This story is the worst of all fairytales, which is, they all come true.
Quick takes, in the form of conversations:
LITTLEFINGER: I am so sorry the horrible rapist to whom I delivered you (whose house sigil is literally a dude being skinned) raped you, horribly. Nobody could have anticipated.
SANSA: Suck Brienne’s dick, pal.
LITTLEFINGER: …
BRIENNE: You heard my Lady.
FOREST CHILDREN: *stab*
NIGHT’S KING: *snarl*
BRAN: The fuck?
FOREST CHILDREN: You guys made us do it.
BRAN: That’s fair.
YARA: I have a totally realistic plan for how this will all work. My dead dad was kind of a jerkwagon, but he did teach me how boats work.
EURON:My passport has more stamps than yours! Theon has no cock! I murdered your shitty king and I liked it!
IRONBORN: Euron! Euron King!
HODOR: I am reasonably normal and happy serving this vaguely royal family household, talking sweetly to Lyanna, scooping up horseshit, baking meat pies and stuff. My deal is okay.
BRAN: *has need of a brain-shaped escape hatch from a swarm of frozen zombies*
HODOR: Hodor.
JAQEN: A girl needs a place to crash and a belief system to keep her alive. A girl will go to this play about her dead family and spy on people making bad jokes about dwarf sex afterwards.
ARYA: FML.
Okay, can we talk about Jorah and Dany for a second?
This is not a show about how Dany needs a boyfriend. Maybe at one time it was, in that stories about Knights and Ladies and Thrones are often about strategic marriages and thus about women being shit on. This show started out being about Dany sold in marriage, one man to another, to buy a third man some power.
We saw how that worked out. Viserys, crowned with gold. Khal Drogo dead, a mercy. And Dany with her dragons, powerful beyond measure, breaking chains, calling down fire from the heavens.
The men in this show keep trying to wrench it back to the beginning. Sell her again: Into slavery, as Hizdhar’s wife. Exile here again: Into obscurity, in the Dosh Khaleen. At every turn she sets their expectations alight and rises up again, unburnt.
And at every turn, Jorah the Andal. (The two of them do nothing for me in the books, but Iain Glen and Emilia Clarke have crazy chemistry, all May-December-of-Next-Year of them.) Whatever door she opens, whatever else is waiting there for her, he is, too. I don’t think it’s about him being her boyfriend. I think if you think anything we’re seeing is about One True Love you and I are not watching the same thing, but everyone else is using her for something. Jorah was once, too. He wanted things from her, too.
Now he can’t ever touch her again, or she will turn to stone with him. He’s dying by inches. There’s no way home for him, no reward, nothing to do except end. He’s still there, and Dany may not need a boyfriend but she sure as hell needs an ally. She commands him, don’t die. She tells him, be ready, when I open the next door.
A.